What you should end up with is some scrap pieces of wood (check), two
more-or-less-flat reindeer profiles (check…ish) and one 3-D reindeer
(Houston, we've had a problem). The reindeer on the left is a flat profile,
but the neck was so thin that the only thing keeping the head on is
the cutting pattern glued on the other side. The one on the right is
another flat profile and technically, is successful (sans one missing
antler—there should be four).

The poor reindeer in the middle though—that was supposed to be the 3-D
ornament and well … the legs on the left side broke off at the “knee”
(oddly enough, they were thicker than the ones on the right, which
amazingly, did not break off) and the entire neck section is
missing (go figure—I never found it).

The scoll-saw also took a bite out of my thumb nail.

Fortunately, that was the only “injury” I sustained.

I did identify two things I could have done differently. One, if the
pattern was about 50% larger, I might have been more successful, as the
original pattern is quite small. Two, I should not have removed
loose pieces as I was cutting (say, the chunk from around the antlers, or
the chunks from around the leg area) as that would have provided some
stability—towards the end I was very afraid that the vibrations from the
scroll-saw was going to rip the legs and antlers right off.

racter: a History

The name of the program is short for raconteur. The
sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as
could be seen by investigation of the template system of text
generation.

Moreover, template processing is sometimes included as a
sub-feature of software packages like text editors, IDEs and
relational database management systems.

…

The observable universe is one causal patch of a much larger
unobservable universe; there are parts of the universe that cannot
communicate with us yet.

If the universe is finite but unbounded, it is also possible that
the universe is smaller than the observable universe. In this case,
what we take to be very distant galaxies may actually be duplicate
images of nearby galaxies, formed by light that has circumnavigated
the universe. It is difficult to test this hypothesis
experimentally because different images of a galaxy would show
different eras in its history, and consequently might appear quite
different. Bielewicz et al. claims to establish a lower bound of
27.9 gigaparsecs (91 billion light-years) on the diameter of the
last scattering surface (since this is only a lower bound, the paper
leaves open the possibility that the whole universe is much larger,
even infinite). This value is based on matching-circle analysis of
the WMAP 7 year data.

and given that the neck might have been a bit thin, it's no wonder the
neck snapped like it did (I think his exact words were “I need to give him
a lesson on woodgrain direction!”).

So, that, the small size, and removing pieces as I cut, lead to a
decapitated 3-D reindeer. But now that I'm finally on vacation from The
Corporation, I felt it was time to tackle this project once more.

I printed the pattern 50% larger, left myself a bit more wood around the
edges to work with, aligned the woodgrain so that it was parallel to the
neck:

and I did not immediately remove pieces as I cut. This time, the results
were much better:

Some careful sanding with fine sandpaper (220 grit) and we get one nice
looking 3-D reindeer in time for Christmas.

(I should note that it's standing in front of a cutting board Bunny made
as a gift for a friend, and both are sitting on some red velvet, just
because).

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go
ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or
entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent
links to that entry only. The format for the links are
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interested in, say 2000/08/01,
so that would make the final URL:

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's
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